Redundancy in measures of depression

Three different scales of depression were administered to 108 subjects including hospitalized inpatients with a diagnosis of major depression (N = 36), inpatients on a renal service (N = 36), and nonhospitalized, healthy volunteers (N = 36). Subjects completed the Beck Depression Inventory and the Depression Adjective Checklist and were rated by a trained clinician on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. Correlations were calculated for the total sample, each group individually, and a random sample of 36 (12 from each group). Results suggest that correlations are sufficiently high to advocate the use of only one measure of depression when one is assessing a heterogeneous group.